First Google Webmaster Tools Update in 2014

Data Accuracy Benefits

The main benefit in increased accuracy of webmaster tools data is the ability to predict scenarios and focus your priorities on keywords and pages with greater potential to grow and generate revenue. We’ve  built our own version of the phrase potential calculator available on http://www.phraseresearch.com. The tool takes raw unaltered Google Webmaster Tools query export CSV and looks up position for each keyword. The end result is a table sortable by potential score, or in other words, a list of keywords likely to bring greatest benefit with the least amount of effort.
 
Why is data not matching?

I hear many complaints that Google Webmaster Tools data is not reliable enough to be actionable. While assessing the accuracy of the data many use Google Analytics as a benchmark. Can you see how this could be a problem? Google Analytics data is not and has never been about absolute accuracy and many factors such as data sampling at large volumes or technical implications including presence and reliability of javascript on tracked URLs. As usual, if you want absolute accuracy you can always turn to log file analysis. Our tests are yet to show a report in Analytics that matches log file data.


Official Announcement

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog has just covered the update on a new post titled “More detailed search queries in Webmaster Tools” saying:

“The search queries feature gives insights into the searches that have at least one page from your website shown in the search results. It collects these “impressions” together with the times when users visited your site – the “clicks” – and displays these for the last 90 days.”

According to John Mueller from Google this update will completely roll out in the next few days.

In other news Google is currently also rolling out a separate update that will show better search query data for websites with separate mobile sites.

“If you have a separate site for smartphones (eg m.example.com) then this will make it a bit easier for you to keep track of the queries going there.”